Redefine Networking for IP Storage

When was the last time you thought about the network connecting your IP storage? Was it when you had to wait for a few weeks to get ports provisioned for new storage? Was it when the network was taken down for routine maintenance and you had to plan for an outage? Or when you had a network outage and waited for hours for it to come back up in order to recover the storage?

Unlike your Fibre Channel SAN, you probably don’t own or manage the network for your IP storage. If you are like many of the customers we have met with over the last year, you are looking for better ways to manage growth, mitigate risk, and reduce costs. It’s clear that shared networks simply cannot handle the growth of business-critical workloads on IP storage.

Traditional Ethernet networks were never designed to address the needs of IP storage.

Virtualization, storage capacity, and the adoption of new storage technologies like flash continues to grow. The growth of business-critical IP storage workloads is accelerating while SLAs are becoming more stringent. Management costs and infrastructure complexity are increasing. The network matters more than ever for IP storage.

It starts within the data center by deploying a dedicated network optimized for IP storage to help you achieve SLAs for your business-critical applications. Brocade VDX switches (6740 and 6940) powered by VCS Fabric Technology are optimized for IP storage traffic delivering maximum performance, low latency, and high resiliency. We are introducing Fabric Vision technology for our VDX switch portfolio, originally developed for Gen 5 Fibre Channel, to simplify network management, provide real-time visibility, and enable automated action. Now you can deploy nearly 20 years of Brocade storage networking best practices to your IP storage network in a single click to implement pre-defined policies, rules, and actions to reduce common network problems and minimize downtime.

Next, you need a resilient infrastructure that can recover from outages and disruptions that cannot be contained within the data center. This requires a disaster recovery solution between geographically distributed data centers. We are introducing IP extension capabilities for the Brocade 7840 Extension Switch that provides local storage replication and strong encryption performance over long distances in order to overcome latency, packet loss, and security challenges. Whether you are replicating between cities or continents, IP extension will move more data over long distance to protect you against all types of disasters.

Finally, to overcome the infrastructure and management complexity, you need to have simple tools that provide the visibility and insight across all of your storage networks. We are introducing new unified dashboards for Brocade Network Advisor to monitor IP and FC health and performance from an intuitive interface. The combination of Brocade Network Advisor and Fabric Vision technology provide advanced storage network management capabilities that will highlight the most relevant and critical storage network metrics.

Brocade has been the de facto standard for storage networking for nearly two decades. Our storage heritage is built into the DNA of every fabric switch we sell whether it’s IP or Fibre Channel.

Don’t settle for a legacy network…

Think big!

Start now at EMC World 2015 where you will have an opportunity to connect with Brocade in a variety of ways to discuss IP storage in depth. EMC is partnering with Brocade to deliver EMC® Connectrix® networking with EMC NAS and iSCSI solutions. EMC was first to market with the Connectrix VDX-6740B IP storage switch and the MP-7840B extension switch and will be launching the new IP storage capabilities for the Connectrix IP storage product line next calendar quarter.

Here are some additional highlights of what we will be doing at EMC World 2015

Visit Brocade in booth #321 to get overviews of our entire IP storage portfolio along with live demos of Brocade Network Advisor, Fabric Vision, and integration with VMware vRealize

Watch Jack Rondoni, VP of storage networking, as he leads a breakout session “Redefining Storage Connectivity for the 3rd Platform from Isilon to XtremIO” on Tuesday May 5th from 4:30-5:30

Watch Mark Detrick, Global Solutions Architect, as he provides a technical deep dive “Storage over Distance from SRDF to SyncIQ” on Wednesday May 6th from 12:00-1:00

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